NEWSLETTER

A NEW YEAR 2024 MESSAGE TO YOU


In 2023, we at the FOLWCC turned every challenge we faced into inspiring hope and active resistance or advancement of our mission!


We engaged in "creative social justice work" using " powerful culture" with more than 20,000 workers and working-class adults, teens, and children - and we are so grateful for your support at every step!


We look forward to YOU joining in our ongoing mission! What the 2024 New Year holds and our collectively building on this past strong foundation of 25 years depends on creative people power and community together. 

Using all our people's socially conscious music, art, poetry, hip-hop, films movies, dance, reading book clubs, health workshops, community gardens, forum discussions, and all our progressive traditions and celebrations unites us and builds people's power!  


See you soon!


ALWAYS...INSPIRING, EDUCATING, ENGAGING, and LIBERATING


FOLWCC Team

Kwanzaa Celebration Photos

Boots Riley on strikes, sedition and sex:

‘Being a communist is the closest to being a superhero there is’


By Steve Rose

theguardian.com


"My whole thing was, I want it to be janky,” says Boots Riley, talking about the ramshackle imperfection of his show I’m A Virgo. “Everything is too smoothed out. You make it a little janky and jangling and people feel it more.” Among this year’s slick small-screen dramas, Riley’s I’m a Virgo sticks out like its main character: a 13ft-tall Black teenager. The premise alone is outlandish enough; what Riley and his team do with it, and how they do it, make I’m a Virgo one of the most bracingly original things on our screens this year or any other. And one of the most revolutionary: the show culminates in a full-on, top to bottom critique of capitalism – in a show streaming on Amazon. How did he get away with it?


Riley, a former musician and activist, already made a name for himself with the 2018 movie Sorry to Bother You – a similarly surreal satire of corporate commerce led by Lakeith Stanfield. “People knew what they were getting into, right?” he says on a video call from Oakland, California, recalling when he pitched his new idea to various streaming platforms. With his mutton-chop sideburns and giant red felt hat, the 52-year-old could be a lost nephew of Sly Stone. “I don’t think they knew everything, but they knew it’s me. They know the thing is crazy.”


The anti-establishment politics was one hurdle; another was how to actually make a show with a giant character, Riley admits. Cootie (played by Jharrel Jerome) is raised in seclusion by his regular-sized aunt and uncle, who fear how the outside world will respond to a supersized Black kid – with justification. The naive teen is welcomed by some local youths, but also prompts fear and hysteria, not least from the neighbourhood superhero: a hi-tech vigilante in an Iron Man vein with shades of Elon Musk (played by a hilariously sullen Walton Goggins), who flies around in a robotic suit, enforcing law and order. Read more here.

JANUARY 2024 CALENDAR OF EVENTS

Saturday, January 6; 2:00-3:30 PM; BWFJ Wake-Durham-Triangle Chapter Meeting. RSVP your attendance to (919) 876-7187.


Monday, January 8; 6:00-8:00 PM; Prevent Diabetes Culinary Program Series; presented by Eatwell Exchange at FOLWCC. This series includes both classroom and cooking instruction; 1/8, 2/1, 2/15, 2/29, 3/21, 3/28, 5/23; cooking instruction – 1/25, 2/8, 2/22, 3/7, 3/21; 6/20 graduation. Classroom & cooking, taught by registered dietician, Jasmine Westbrooks; contact: Jasmine@eatwellexchange.org for more info and to register. Class size is limited. There are a few openings left.


Saturday, January 13; 10:00 AM; Biltmore Hills Neighborhood Association meeting at Biltmore Hills Community Center 2615 Fitzgerald Dr., Raleigh, NC. If you would like to participate in the meeting reply to Rhonda Little (919) 537-6969, email: rhondalittle10@yahoo.com. You can also contact Gregory Moss at (704) 773-7388, email: gregory.k.moss@gmail.com.


Saturday, January 13; 10:00 AM-2:00 PM; Quilting Classes at the FOLWCC. The first class will be from 10:00 AM–2:00 PM; all other classes will be 10:00 AM-1:00 PM; January 27; February 3 & 17; and March 2, 2024. Classes will be taught by an experienced quilter, Cynthia Hayes. Contact her at chayes10@gmail.com to register, for class cost and supply list and questions. Space is limited to the first 10 registrants.


Monday, January 15; 11:00 AM; M.L. King Commemoration, Teach-in & Raleigh City Workers Union, UE150 support phone blitz at FOLWCC. RSVP your attendance to (919) 876-7187.


Tuesday, January 16; 3:30-6:00 PM; M.L. King informational picket and rally/Support Workers Bill of Rights/ Cease-Fire in Gaza/ at Raleigh City Town Hall


Sunday, January 20; 4:00-8:00 PM; Only on Sunday Jazz Sessions at FOLWCC; Live music featuring the band- Jazz Builds the 919. $15 per person or 4 for $40; Music, Poetry, Food, Vendors, Good News & Fun; to RSVP or for vendor information, registration and attendance, call Nathanette at (919) 876-7187 or email fruitoflaborwcc@netscape.com. A social justice fundraiser.

FOLWCC Freedom-Liberation Archive Needs Your Support

The Fruit of Labor World Cultural Center's FREEDOM_LIBERATION ARCHIVES houses community /labor activist & organizer G. Angaza Sababu Laughinghouse's collectected historical, political and personal materials and projects from the 1960's to present. There are more than 70 cabinets of youth,student, struggle against racist workplace discrimination and birth /demise of Affirmative Action, African-Liberation, "new" Black left, Black working class community, labor and economic development centered on Black workers, and the many organizations that shaped his life and political experiences. From the 1960's-present, his personal notes, diaries, photos, investigations, interviews, and other stories are documented on a wide range of key issues & struggles for Black freedom and liberation, plus a collection of still-relevant lessons of historical pieces from today's struggles.


An archive in a time of crisis which can provide lessons and tools for today's organizing in our communities and workplaces.


The FOLWCC is a INDY Triangle, NC Best Kept Secret Finalist as the home to the 40 year old Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble- Black Workers For Justice 's Cultural Pillar, Hip Hop 4 Justice and the NC Chapter of National Conference of Black Lawyers.Institute's and several other social justice movement building efforts! Scholar-activists and organizers from around the world have reviewed and sought out its materials and published from the 1060's-present materials. The Freedom-Liberation Archives is important not just because of what it tells us about our past, but they are the tools that provides for our present and future organizing! 


Contact FOLWCC

AVAILABLE NOW!

Music and songs that inspire, engage, and liberate our spirit!


Enjoy Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble’s Album: State of Emergency


The album is available on

Amazon, Apple Music, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube Music, iHeart Radio 

and many more streaming services and retailers. 

Marc Lamont Hill, Otis Moss III, Dima Khalidi |

Gaza On Our Minds (Panel Discussion)

Margaret Walker

1915–1998

For My People


For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

    repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

    and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

    unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

    unseen power;

 

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

   gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

   washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

   hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

  dragging along never gaining never reaping never

   knowing and never understanding;

 

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

  backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

   and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

   and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

  Miss Choomby and company;

 

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

   to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

   people who and the places where and the days when, in

   memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

   were black and poor and small and different and nobody

   cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

 

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

   be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

   play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

   marry their playmates and bear children and then die

  of consumption and anemia and lynching;

 

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

   Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

   Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

   people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

   people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

  land and money and something—something all our own;

 

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

    being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

    burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

    and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

    who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

 

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

    the dark of churches and schools and clubs

    and societies, associations and councils and committees and

    conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

    devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

    preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

    false prophet and holy believer;

 

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

  from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

   trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

   all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

 

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

   bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

   generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

   loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

   healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

   in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

   be written, let the dirges disappear.

Let a race of men now rise and take control.